If your life sometimes seems directionless, you might legitimately blame the universe. According to the key tenets of modern physics, the cosmos is “isotropic” at multi-billion-light-year scales—meaning it should have the same look and behavior in every direction. Ever since the big bang nearly 14 billion years ago, the universe ought to have expanded identically […]
Protected areas have long served as a refuge for wildlife. There are more than 100 endangered species in Hawaii’s Haleakalā National Park alone. Bajo Madidi, in the Bolivian Amazon, is home to rare river otters that grow up to six feet long. And in Indonesia, some of the last Sumatran tigers on Earth prowl through […]
Earlier today, April 14th, former President Barack Obama posted a 12-minute address in which he endorsed Joe Biden for president. No surprise there. And most of the address was about politics. Some of it, though, was about policy. You can’t completely decouple politics and policy, of course. But here are three short clips from Obama […]
Originally published in July 1957 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “The Council of the American Meteorological Society recently summed up the present evidence for the effectiveness of cloud-seeding. Its verdict: Not proven. Conditions favorable for artificial rainmaking, the statement points out, are very much the same as those which usually lead to natural rain. Says the […]
It is time to start anew. More than a century after neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer gave the first scientific talk describing the disease that bears his name today, we have no good treatments for this thief of minds, and we certainly have no cure. Today 40 million to 50 million people worldwide suffer from Alzheimer’s disease […]
Magazine issue closes are always hectic. We spend months working on each edition, but then for one week, roughly six weeks before publication, we have to triple-check each of the some 100 pages in the book and get them out the door in time to meet our monthly printer deadline. This close is different. As […]
Scientists have crafted a trap for the dengue virus using a scaffold made from fragments of DNA. The star-shaped structure is engineered to single out the virus in the bloodstream and latch on to it with precision, providing a powerful yet simple test to detect the mosquito-transmitted disease. Dengue is the world’s fastest-growing vector-borne disease, […]
The recent announcement that the United States Food and Drug Administration has approved the “compassionate use” of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat patients with coronavirus disease has been received with mixed emotions around the globe. While many have hailed this move as a welcome development in the search for therapeutics against the COVID-19 pandemic, some […]
Twice per year, Ed Dever’s group at Oregon State University in Corvallis heads out to sea off the Oregon and Washington coasts to refurbish and clean more than 100 delicate sensors that make up one segment of a US$44-million-per-year scientific network called the Ocean Observatories Initiative. “If this had been a normal year, I would […]
My alarm clock sounds at 6:45 A.M. I reach over and extend my arm to the empty space beside me, feeling for the lingering heat from his body that I know will be gone. He has been awake for hours already. If I strain to listen through the walls between our bedroom and his office, […]